Amor Mundi

Daniel Ellsberg in Memoriam
 

Roger Berkowitz
Daniel Ellsberg died this week. A military analyst for the Rand Corporation, Ellsberg is best known for his act of principled courage in leaking the Pentagon Papers to the Press.

Normalizing Corruption And Its Limits

Roger Berkowitz
Why is the first-ever indictment of a former President being met with such equanimity from so many in the Republicans Party? Of course some like former governor Chris Christie have rightly condemned the President’s spoiled-child-I’m-above-the-law act and defended the prosecution. But the nihilistic wing of the Republican Party openly suggests that violence may be the appropriate response to Justice Department overreach. And even the usually more critical Wall St. Journal—which acknowledges that “Republicans deserve a more competent champion with better character than Mr. Trump”— headlines its lead editorial “A Destructive Trump Indictment”.

On Truth and Power

I’m grading papers for a new seminar I taught this past semester on Truth and Politics. It was one of the most exciting courses I’ve taught in a few years, with simply fantastic students who brought incredible passion and curiosity to perhaps the burning question of our moment. Structured around a close reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s short but brilliant “How The True World Became a Fable," the students came to understand what Nietzsche means when he says that “truth is a lie,” or “truth is a woman,” or “truth is a fable.” Plato invented truth because of a distrust of opinion. Confronted with the trial and death of Socrates, Plato was convinced that political opinion in a democracy was dangerous, unstable, and irrational. What was needed was training of the best, those able to see beyond the shadows and deceptions of the human world, those who could step out of the cave of human affairs and focus their attention on the supersensual truths of the ideas. These philosophers claimed to know the rational truth, and from this they claimed the right to rule as philosopher kings. The question of the course became simply: If truth is a lie, is it a lie we should cherish and protect? 
 

The Banality at Cannes

Roger Berkowitz
Apparently Hannah Arendt was on everyone’s lips this year at the Cannes film festival. Alissa Wilkinson does a nice job of parsing the allusions to Arendt. 

Resist Orthodoxy

Roger Berkowitz
My daughter graduated high school and at her ceremony, one of the speakers talked about the importance of stories and storytelling. Any event becomes meaningful when and if we tell a story about it. This does not mean that “I” am in full control of my story, that the world revolves around me and my story. Rather, it means, that the stories we tell, the communities we share, the lives we live and compose together weave us into tapestries of collective worlds, they give our lives meaning and insert us into a shared world. Stories can be told and re-told, yet stories are collective. They require both a teller and an audience, and the audience will again tell and retell the story, making it a collective experience. 

Living Amidst the Shadows

Roger Berkowitz
Suzy Hansen writes about the photographs and the journey of Turkish photographer Emin Özmen as he has documented Turkey’s descent from a democracy on the cusp of joining the European Union to an autocracy. Hansen collaborates with Özmen whose haunting photographs make palpable sense of powerlessness in Erdogan’s Turkey.

What Is Auditing

Elaine Godfrey writes about Rob Sand, the State Auditor of Iowa. The Iowa legislature recently passed a bill limiting the auditor’s access to information.  If you want to know why, listen to Sand’s answer to an elementary school student who asked him what an auditor does. It will remind us, also, of one way to respond to the relentless attacks on truth that confound our efforts to govern ourselves.

The Caretakers
Roger Berkowitz
 

The primary need totalitarianism satisfies is the need for meaning. While fantasies of national belonging are part of the populist playbook, so too is the basic desire for a strongman to take care of us. There is a deep human need to be taken care of, and liberal democratic governments are failing in that task.  Francisco Toro argues that the model populist strongman today is Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Toro looks to Bukele’s incredible popularity to help understand the underlying factors driving the populist revolution. 

The Great Acceleration
 

Roger Berkowitz
All around us are warnings about the consequences of generative AI for our jobs, our democracy, and our humanity. And all around us is excitement for the possibilities that generative AI will make us richer, more informed, safer, and better. The transformation of human society will be intense, swift, and powerful. And we all need guides to help us through.  Walter Russell Mead does an excellent job of sketching out the challenges we face, contextualizing it in history, and posing questions for the present.